When the organising committee of the 102nd Indian Science Congress invited Muhammad Yunus to deliver the symposium’s first major public lecture on Friday, the Nobel laureate told them he was no scientist.

Two hours before he gave that talk at the five-day annual summit, the 74-year-old told Mumbai Mirror that he was also no agriculturist, doctor or public health specialist, but merely an economist.

And yet, a cursory survey of his life’s work presents sufficient evidence that he is all those things.

The first indication of his protean nature is conspicuous in a deceptively simple technological innovation he introduced, when he created Grameen Bank in 1983, an institution that would grow to become the largest community development bank in that country, servicing more than 8.5 million impoverished people, and one that brought the idea of microcredit to mainstream consciousness.

The idea he ushered in was to a passbook what an app is to a smartphone. “When we began disbursing microcredit to the needy in Bangladesh, we saw that apart from the lack of access to banking, they were plagued by several other problems: cholera, for one,” he said.

“In the late 60s, the Cholera Research Laboratory in Dhaka had found a way to battle the disease with Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) – which involved administering a simple saline solution to those afflicted, but no one knew how to use it in remote parts of the country, so we decided to intervene.”

Yunus directed his officials to print on the back of each passbook issued to a Grameen Bank customer a simple diagram explaining how molasses, salt and water could be combined to create an ORT.

“This meant that a woman who held a loan account in our bank could become empowered enough to teach others in her village how to make ORT solutions. In a sense, she became the village doctor.”

Yunus, who along with the bank he founded, was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2006 for “their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below”, abounds with such anecdotes, each one proving that he is what he says he is not.

Take agriculturist: to combat night blindness in Bangladeshi children, Grameen Bank began to hand out 1 taka (81 paise at current rates) packets of seeds so their families could grow vegetables rich in Vitamin A, becoming the country’s largest seed seller.

Or public health expert: The bank insisted that a person who had applied for a loan would be granted one only after it had ascertained that he or she had dug a hole in the vicinity of their homes so they could defecate without creating unsanitary living conditions.

Although he may reject these labels, the one description Yunus gladly accepts is that of being an entrepreneur, an identifier that is closely linked to Yunus Social Business (YSB), an incubator he founded in 2011, the year Sheikh Hasina’s government, which, according to his supporters, felt threatened by Yunus’s popularity and putative political ambitions, removed him as the Managing Director of the bank he founded.

Yunus challenged his ouster in the Bangladesh High Court the same year, which later upheld the decision to dislodge him. He declined to discuss the episode on or off the record.

However, Yunus brightened at the prospect of proposing how his experience with Grameen Bank and YSB could benefit India.

“Microcredit is spreading in this country, but it is limited,” he said. “In Bangladesh, we decided to go bold and big, but here it (the practice of microcredit, which could mean lending as little as a few hundred rupees to a household) is restricted to villages – it hasn’t even transcended to the state level. There is enormous potential in expanding it as big as we did in Bangladesh.”

In India, the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) functions, in a limited sense, as this country’s Grameen Bank – it issues loans based on Reserve Bank of India guidelines to self-help groups.

“We recommended to NABARD that this conventional way of doing things - a large national institution issuing loans to small groups - would have limited impact,” he said.

“But they told us their numbers are big [NABARD disbursed Rs 20,590 crore to selfhelp groups in 2012-13, a 24.5 percent jump from the previous year]. I said to them, you have a big country; your numbers will be big. But you will not be able to reach the farthest corners of India.”

Yunus is just as assertive when he discusses the other massive social engineering effort in this country, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA), which in 2013-14 distributed Rs 26,685.33 crore as assured wages in the country’s 648 districts.

“We should start thinking beyond employment, beyond the idea that people should be job seekers,” he said. “I believe that each human being is an entrepreneur, that we should be job makers.”

It is this dogma that animates YSB, which functions as a venture capital firm, investing small sums in people who have a business plan, and sharing in their profits - they have interests in six such ventures in India, of which two, Sakhi Retail, a network of women entrepreneurs and Sparc, which provides community sanitation, are based in Maharashtra.

Yunus is convinced that the business of social entrepreneurship holds enormous potential in this country.

“It is already mandated here that corporations should set aside 2 percent of their net profit on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) programmes [the Companies Act requires that all businesses with a net worth of over Rs 500 crore or more or a turnover greater than or equal to Rs 1,000 crore or with a net profit of Rs 5 crore or more do so],” he said.

“I’ve been arguing that you should amend the law to mandate that these companies set aside 1 percent of that 2 percent to be invested in social business. They will see returns. Because, you see, charity money has only one time use. Social business has endless use.”

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